david weinberger

The pyramid illustrates our thinking about thinking (and life) the last couple hundred of years. The network is what is natural. The web is helping us to see that dimensionality. [x-d glasses – ness]

The one thing the pyramid has that the network doesn’t, is a foundation.

Perhaps, there are no basics, no foundation.

Perhaps the better pyramids are pruned to the individual or the moment/demand – of just-in-time, need-t0-know learning. Perhaps that is how our days get longer.. and we find we have all we need. [Fried’s rework]

Schools teach but a billionth of a percent of the knowledge in the world, yet we quibble endlessly about which billionth of a percent is important, and the order in which is should be presented. – Seymour Papert

But this tendency to flock may be keeping us from finding the information we need,” and the tools we’ve built for the Internet only enhance our flocking bias.

“Creativity is an import-export business,” he said, the result of a cross-pollination of ideas and cultures that compels people to reflect on their assumptions. Those who are open to diversity and cognitive border-crossings, explained Zuckerman, “are at high risk of having good ideas.”

Zuckerman believes that change is possible. “If we don’t like how the Internet works now, we can fix it.” He recommended, for example, his own Berkman project called Global Voices, which shares online content from around the world. “It’s incumbent on us not to be satisfied with our tools,” and to build new ones that correct for our blind spots, he said.

Citing an example from “Rewire,” Weinberger pointed to the urban planner Jane Jacobs, who championed a style of city design “to engineer encounters and engagement” in ways that promote diverse communities. “I certainly favor structuring serendipity,” said Weinberger.

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#getrewired

his talk at the Berkman center on Rewire:

23 min – how to build better tools for connecting

24 – not sure if i want my friends pre-filtering for me.. the tools of social search may be driving us into the same circles

26 – creative is an import/export business. thieves.

27:30 – how to take advantage of incredible cognitive diversity

28 – we could have an alternative:

a conversation of what we want

if we don’t like how the internet works – we can fix it

30 – how do you track your own behavior

we’ve gotten so good at tracking our bodies – but not our minds…

cognitive tracking

follow bias

41 – we live in an era where we don’t need to have close ties – as far as what used to force us to be close

44 – what does it mean to make diverse ties with others.. that let’s you care enough about them to tie you over

1:06 – serendipity – ed to cultivate desire – other is something we do – interest – in things we had no idea we were interested in

1:08 – structured serendipity will just look like noise, unless something is mixed in – empathy not enough – has to have a quality of great journalism or art of ….. we need paul simon-ish bridge

1:09:45 – ethan – end of book – we can do many things for you – but we can’t create desire – curation/search/social – to perhaps serendipity – taking you somewhere out of what you know and what you’ve encountered..

[so – perhaps curiosity – in the city – as the day…?]

1:11:49 – perhaps it’s the word – engineering – that is tripping us up

the more ways our digital photos can be sorted, ordered, clustered and made sense of – the more misc they are – the better. …

memory becomes less what we have assembled and locked away and more what we can assemble and share

p 13

“The digital world thereby allows us to transcend the most fundamental rule of ordering the real world : Instead of everything having its place, it’s better if things can get assigned multiple places simultaneously.

the chaos.. the fomo ness…

18

from atoms… can only be in one spot at a time.. to bits.. this third order removes the limitations we’ve assumed were inevitable in how we organize info

20

the immateriality of bits encourages corbis to put its images in every place where people might look for them

21

flickr has no professional cataloger. it relies solely on the labels users make up for themselves, w/o control or guidance.

22

2nd order organization, it turns out, is often as much about authority as about making things easier to find.

we can confront misc directly in all it unfulfilled glory. we can do it ourselves and , more significantly, we can do it together, figuring out the arrangements that make sense for us now and the new arrangements that make sense a minute later.

..it’s not going to work unless the whole planet can get onboard

In the past I would have said that so long as this architecture endures, so will the transfer of values from that architecture to the systems that run on top of it. But while the Internet’s architecture is still in place, the values transfer may actually be stifled by the many layers that have been built on top of it.

In short, my fear is that the Internet has been paved. You can spend an entire lifetime on the Internet and never feel its loam between your toes.

[..]

If I adjust my Nest thermostat, I’m using the Internet, but does anyone think that that encourages me to adopt so-called Internet values? The case is stronger if we talk about the web instead of the Internet, but in the Age of Apps, the web is in decline.

[..]

over time, the Internet escaped from its creators’ intentions. It became a way to communicate person-to-person via email and many-to-many via Usenet. The web came along and the prototypical example became home pages. Social networking came along and the prototype became Facebook. Mobile came along and the prototype became apps—although I’m not convinced that this last step has actually happened.

Keep in mind that a prototype is simply what is taken to be a clear, unambiguous example of something. It leaves plenty of room for less clear examples.

[..]

if users don’t come into contact with the Internet’s architecture, that architecture can’t shape them.If they instead deal almost exclusively with Facebook, then the conclusion of the Argument from Architecture ought to be that Facebook is shaping the values of its users. And Facebook’s values are not much like the Net’s.

[..]

So, it’s not just that many of us live in applications like Facebook, and never see the light of the Internet’s One True Architecture. Sandvig’s point means that even if you walk outside of your favorite application, the architecture itself has been distorted by the needs of commercial content creators and their enabling pals. Paradise has been well and truly paved.

[..]

hope:

1\ the Internet’s architecture still shows through many of the big corporate apps that are the Internet’s new pavement.

2\ the Internet is still there for entrepreneurs and generous spirits.

3\ open culture lives… there is a cadre of young folks, native to the Internet, who Get It…. infused with a spirit of play.

[..]

As the Internet’s architecture shapes our behavior and values less and less directly, we’re going to have to undertake the propagation of the values embedded in that architecture as an explicit task. We can encourage the development of sites and services that show off the Internet’s eclectic, improvisational skills.…. lots of things we can do.. we must do them all..

Does living with an explicit “taste of death in our mouths” (Montaigne) make life better? Make us more “authentic”?hyperorg.com/blogger/2015/1…

My understanding, such as it is, of Heidegger’s idea of Being-toward-death is that our temporal finitude is constantly present as a horizon: we look before we cross the street because we know we can die — “know” not as an explicit thought but as the landscape within which our experience occurs. We make long-term plans within a horizon of possibility that we number in decades and not centuries.

David Weinberger (born 1950) is an American technologist, professional speaker, and commentator, probably best known as co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto (originally a website, and eventually a book, which has been described as “a primer on Internet marketing”). Weinberger’s work focuses on how the Internet is changing human relationships, communication, and society.

A philosopher by training, he holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and taught college from 1980-1986. He was a gag writer for the comic strip “Inside Woody Allen” from 1976-1983. He became a marketing consultant and executive at several high-tech companies, and currently serves as a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, where he co-teaches a class on “The Web Difference” with John Palfrey.In addition, he is Co-Director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School. He had the title Senior Internet Advisor to Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, and provided technology policy advice to John Edwards’ 2008 presidential campaign.

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@dweinberger

Best convention in my lifetime. Changed what it means to be a Democrat, and retrieved what it means to be American. hyperorg.com/blogger/2016/0…

on 71% ness none of us free if one of us chained public consensus oppresses we have means to do better (which i learned from you)